In conventional so-called crowd-sourcing applications, an open call attempt to reach many people who are to perform a specific task. A use of so-called “gamification elements” is conventional in connection with location-dependent crowd-sourcing applications, for example in the applications WAZE® or Yelp® (www.yelp.com). In the case of Yelp®, the user is motivated to “check in” in real locations, for example train stations or shops. For this purpose, the user is able to become the “duke” of the location and to earn badges. In the case of WAZE®, the user has a personal avatar, which the user is able to develop further if he provides information about traffic jams or speed traps to a community.
In connection with parking spots, the Parkopedia application (www.parkopedia.de/mobile-parking-apps) uses points, badges and ranking lists as gamification elements in order to motivate people to provide information about parking spots to a community. German Patent Application No. DE 10 2012 216 994 A1 describes a method for referring parking spots and a free-parking spot assistance system, road users ascertaining information about free parking spots and transmitting the information to a cloud computing system, the cloud computing system recording information about the free parking spots in a parking spot map in a retrievable manner. Furthermore disclosed are a computer program and a free-parking spot assistant system, which is suitable for implementing the method.